Atlas the MONOLOGUE by Rahil Najafabadi

Places

In the corners of your world, I created my own. I was hoping to bring someone into the corridors where roaming is allowed. Every world has its edges until it merges with the air of another existence. Mine just exists in the unrented spaces of the ordinary world.

My human has become conscious. Self-conscious.

One of those pages slipped into his hands and he began reading. His eyes moved to the end of each line, and with every expression I knew what he was learning about himself.

I think that to write of someone is to be in a dance with someone––But to dance with someone is to fall in place with someone. I fell in place and began with that person, here in this atlas.

Things

My small Earth is structured asymmetrically.
The only things are the dome and the mountain. There’s a moral significance of not knowing which was here
first.

If I were a dome, I’d be a blue, blue dome. Taped with tiles geometrically with odd pointing stars.
I’d be blue and dark blue, and a little white at the bottom. Maybe a small moon at my pointed arch that is
closest to the sky.

If I were a mountain, I’d be blue again and not brown. There’d be white at the top, sugarcoating me.
I know if I was a dome, I’d wish to be a mountain. And I know if I were a mountain, I’d wish I weren’t so blue.
I’d probably let people visit and light a small fire down the hills, and watch them get warm. When I’m a mountain,
I’m neither volcanic, nor a demon-ridden range. I let people come and go. I let fires burn me because there is no tree
but the ones kids carve on.

What they don’t know is that I am the mountain, the tree, and the hill with fires that is left behind.

A Person

Words cannot stay in my mind but feelings can––the feelings given to words.
Another day won’t slip away to the fall and eruption of emotions, or the lack thereof.
Boughs and black branches dropping like sunlight in reverse, waiting for detrimental craving:
They know where the cheetahs and lions hide. They know when the sun makes its return.
Doesn’t it scare the little birds, the birds, how the wooden boughs have been here longer?
The long trail of trust from walking up the mountain from the dome, without knowing
Any moment is a chance that these branches may fall. They do, but who thinks of them,
When there is a blue mountain and a mirroring dome that are replicas of each other?
Cheetahs run from the sun, because they know they cannot trust her or her friend, the lion.
Lions run after the cheetahs, and the sun watches over their game of extinction until it’s dark.
But the branches watch it all, and fall when they fall knowing the sun and the truth,
That tomorrow the animals will run after each other again, and the dome will hold prayers.

Dreams

I’ve awaken mid nightmare to tell you, you were in both the good dream and the bad:
The one with the dome collapsing, and its ancient blue tiles breaking, just like the one with the blue mountain
turning brown before it died.

I’ve come to tell you that branches fall,
And they fall on the flower whose stem you’d never be able to break because its home
Is already broken.

There were two of you, and it seems I’ve returned to dreams instead of dome for a prayer.

In one dream, you saw me and rushed past the hands tilted toward the sky to meet me.
In another, you rushed past me to meet another whose hand you held.

The branches fell on me in both dreams.
My hands were scarred from the rough wood that tore me awake from the good sleep,
And my mind battered from the image I couldn’t escape unconsciously, the boughs truly fell––
Trapping me but leaving just enough space for my eyes to see you somewhere else, even
in the depths of a dark dream.

Nature

The corridors of my world that are printed flat on a paper surface like an atlas have expanded,
and so has the ordinary world with seawater ceasing to land, making room for more of us.
I think ruins are the remains of a cheetah once lived and forever hunted and not a broken dome.
A dome is what we make, but a home is what we create. “Identity is what we create” but how come,
I still have none?
I have a home, a blue dome, a mountain I call a mirror of the dome, but I am still drunk from the barrels of
a dying sun.

Now go to sleep, knowing you are loved.

But know, there are questions awaiting your departure in a place without dreams.
Did you know, if someone had every bit of the sun that died, they would give it to you to become your light.
That someone is me.

I’d trap pieces of the sun, like pieces of your heart in a jar––the sun in the jar for you to see, the pieces of you
for me to keep near you, where you can still feel them.
Although, those pieces of your heart were pieces of you, like tiles of the dome in shape of a star.
Perhaps at a distanced dome, our sun too, looks like the shrine tiled star.
I’d give it to you, and climb the mountain that never dies to reach another dome and another star that is alive––
to bring you another jar of a foreign light.

In these lights, I hide my words meant for you: the words I gave feelings to.
Here in this atlas, there are no lines between us.
There is no prayer unless your poetry becomes a prayer––unless you want your prayer to be a prayer.

Atlas by Rahil Najafabadi, Ink on synthetic paper, 2022.

And in truth,
The awakening is not the atlas,
But knowing there can never be one without light.

-Rahil Najafabadi